


reminding you we used to be three and not just two

by judypoovey



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy - All Media Types
Genre: Emotional Constipation IN SPACE, Gen, Getting Drunk and Talking About Feelings, Spoilers for Vol 2, needed more fic where kraglin and peter dont get along
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 09:34:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10896579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/judypoovey/pseuds/judypoovey
Summary: Yondu had always loomed between Kraglin and Peter.Two Ravagers deal with the absence of their big blue buffer.





	reminding you we used to be three and not just two

**Author's Note:**

> I definitely need to write about Peter and Kraglin from the vibe I got about their relationship during the movie. I always got the sense that it was strained. Anyway! Come hang out with me on tumblr.
> 
> http://rhllors.tumblr.com

“You look creepy,” Gamora said as she came up on Peter where he lingered in the shadows. He was watching Kraglin pilot from a very safe distance, contemplating their shared loss and the fact that since the funeral, they’d hardly spoken. This wasn’t particularly alarming to Peter, who had spent 26 years barely talking to Kraglin, but the other Guardians found it passing odd, and it was starting to get to him. “If you want to talk to him, you probably need to move closer.”

“I’m not being creepy,” he said, a little miffed.

“What’s bothering you?”

A lot of things, he wanted to say. Yondu. Ego. Nebula bumming off them. When their next job would come. When Groot would slow down and stop growing up right before his eyes (his heart hurt a little when he noticed every day that Groot had gotten just a bit bigger and a bit less helpless). The unspoken thing with Gamora.

Primarily, though, it bothered him that he knew that he needed to talk to Kraglin and hadn’t yet. They had both suffered a heavy loss on Ego’s planet, and Peter thought that only the two of them and Rocket really felt the gravity of it. Of course, Gamora and Drax and Mantis were _sad_ , but they weren’t… It was different, when it was your family.

He walked away from his shadowy spot, intending to go back to bed. “It’s just complicated,” he said when Gamora made it clear they weren’t leaving the conversation behind.

“You two have barely spoken since Yondu died,” she said, noticing his flinch and putting a hand on his shoulder.

He settled down on the bed. Groot was snuggled up to Drax, and Peter felt a pang of disappointment. He kind of liked when the little guy cuddled up to him on nights it was too hard to sleep. Without him, all he could do was pace the ship. “So?”

“You don’t think you _should_?”

Peter looked over at her, making a face halfway between a smile and a grimace, shrugging with one shoulder and gesturing vaguely with the other hand. “Why?”

“You both lost someone you loved, right? And everything you thought you knew about your childhood just got uprooted. Isn’t that worth a discussion?” She was right, but it hurt too much to admit.

The thing was, he couldn’t think back on his childhood or Yondu without feeling like he was going to fall apart. Dissecting his past with the one person who probably wanted to do that less than Peter did sounded like a nightmare. Yondu had always loomed between Kraglin and Peter. There was very little between them that had not been between the two of them and Yondu.

There were small things though; Peter learned the finer points of flying from Kraglin (who was better at it than Yondu, though that was never spoken aloud), he’d learned the finer points of drinking and knife throwing and a fairly incomplete lesson on talking to potential romantic partners, too. Those things had been wholly between the two of them, but they were so inconsequential.

“We never got along when I was a kid,” he said, though it wasn’t _completely_ true. “I wouldn’t know where to start.” He wanted someone to talk about Yondu with.

Kraglin was the only person left.

But he wasn’t sure if he was ready for that.

\--

He woke up the next morning with a memory tugging at the edges of his brain, and he knew exactly what to do.

When he had been sixteen, he had been on the ship with Tullk and Kraglin. They had drawn the babysitter straw of the night. Peter was old enough to take care of himself, but he had started a few fires the week before so he was being treated like a kid while the rest of the crew was off doing who knows what.

They were playing some kind of card game and drinking and Peter was listening to his Walkman.

“Pete,” Tullk called. Of Yondu’s crew, Tullk was one of the nicer ones, to Peter. He looked big and scary with his tattoos and his scars, but he was loyal to Yondu, which meant he put up with (and looked out for, in a lot of cases) Peter. “Come ‘ere.”

He scooted his chair over and kicked his feet up on their table.

Kraglin pushed his feet off and rolled his eyes. “Want a drink?”

“What, really?” he asked, suspiciously eying the pile of bottles on the table. Last time he had drank had been two years ago – he had snuck some and gotten sick and they’d laughed themselves silly over it. (Yondu had said “that’s how ya learn your limits, boy,” and laughed a little too.)

Since then he hadn’t really been allowed near the drinks. Ravagers were a “do what you want” bunch, but they had all agreed that a drunken pubescent Terran was too much of a liability and a general pain in their collective ass, so it wasn’t tolerated.

But now Kraglin was offering him a drink.

“Sure. Come on. Bout time you learned to handle it.”

He joined their game and had a few drinks, and managed to avoid making an ass of himself. They had told him embarrassing stories about some of the more malicious crew members (like the time Taserface’s beard had gotten torn off by a rogue piece of machinery).

It was one of the fondest memories of Kraglin he had.

So, they were going to deal with the residual tension by getting drunk.

\--

When they refueled two days later, he picked up everything he’d need, and once most everyone had settled down for the evening, he cracked open a bottle and handed it to Kraglin.

“We haven’t gotten drunk together in a while,” he said, pulling out some cups. “Might be the right time to.”

“Really? Last time we drank together you started cryin’ and we had to carry you back onto the ship because you forgot how to walk,” Kraglin said in his typical deadpan, and Peter groaned.

“Come on man, that was just one time.”

“ _Four_ times,” Kraglin corrected.

This was why they didn’t talk. Peter always felt like he was a little kid again when he did. Like he didn’t know anything about anything. When the others were around he was “Captain” and he knew that there was respect there, but it was too easy to slip back into old habits.

“Don’t tell the others,” he muttered into his cup.

Kraglin nodded in agreement, but it wasn’t convincing.

“How’s Rocket’s modification of the fin going?” Peter asked.

Kraglin had very quickly decided that while he accepted Yondu’s arrow, he wasn’t particularly keen on the massive head-fin. He and Rocket had set to tweaking it to be more suitable for him last week.

“Goin’ good.”

“The big mohawk look not for you?” he asked, trying to joke.

“Just thought it’d be a shitty way to wake up; look at my reflection and it’s like ‘hey Kraglin, Yondu’s dead, don’t forget!’. Nah. No thank you.”

Peter understood that completely. He rolled over every morning and the Zune stared at him from the drawer he kept it in. It had stopped being a fresh knife wound eventually, but the dull throb was still there.

Kraglin cleared his throat and pointed at the back his neck. “Rocket reckons it can get wired in back there. Less obvious. Less of a huge target if Nebula decides she’s gonna shoot me.” It was a joke, but a shitty one. They both kind of chuckled, though, and fell into silence.

After two silently tossed back drinks, Peter sighed. “How’d you get out of the mutiny alive?” he asked. Rocket had told him…a very tactful version of the story. None of them had wanted to relive it yet. But it was the biggest question in the days leading up to Yondu’s death, and it had been bothering him a little.

He knew Taserface. Taserface was a moron but he had a streak of pragmatism that meant he wasn’t gonna do anything that he didn’t have support to do.

Including mutiny.

Half-Nut and Gef and Retch did not carry a lot of respect among the crew. Kraglin did.

“By keeping my mouth shut,” he said, his mood darkening immediately. His shoulders were stiff and a muscle was twitching in his jaw.

That was entirely what Peter had expected.

“I helped your friends escape, that should be enough.” It was enough. Right?

Peter poured another drink, trying to work out the growing tension in his back and arms. “You wanted to give us to the Sovereign.”

Kraglin gave him an inelegant jerk of the shoulders as an answer, putting his own drink down. “A million units, Pete. A job’s a job.”

Anger bristled in him. Was he actually mad at Kraglin? Probably not. It was a vague sort of anger that he hadn’t dealt with in the wake of Yondu’s death. He was mad at _everything_. “You always hated me, it makes sense.”

“ _Hated_ you? I helped raise you, you ungrateful little shit!”

He finished another drink and poured the next one, unaware of how drunk he was very quickly getting, his own emotional clarity taking a sharp dive as every little insult from his childhood took over the logic center of his brain. “You didn’t do shit for me!” he snapped back, and that was it.

Peter didn’t know how the fight started, but they were drunkenly yelling nonsense at each other and then they were on the floor. Peter was twice Kraglin’s size, but he had never won a fight against him. Mostly because he only tried to fight him when he was this specific level of drunk, or when he had been a small child.

So, when the rest of the Guardians burst in, startled by the commotion, they were treated to Peter flat on his stomach, one of Kraglin’s arms around his neck and his knee firmly on Peter’s spine.

“You’re such a jackass!” Peter yelled, flailing, his face turning red.

“You’re a dick!”

Nebula grabbed Kraglin around the waist and hauled him off, using way too much force and slamming him into a wall by mistake.

“Nebula what the fuck?”

“I thought you’d weigh more than that!” she growled as they righted themselves.

Gamora yanked Peter up by the jacket and held on when he drunkenly stumbled forward, trying to continue the fight. “What the hell are you two doing?” she yelled.

“He wanted to sell us to the Sovereign!” Peter yelled. No one else seemed to care, and honestly Peter didn’t either. Why was he even yelling? “He never told me about my jackass father!” he blurted out, the shell around his own churning emotions finally breaking open.

The other Guardians’ silence was enough that Peter started to feel self-conscious about his own drunken anger. He pulled back from Gamora and straightened his jacket, his shoulders slumping.

She gestured for her sister to follow her, and with one extra glance at Kraglin, Nebula followed, ushering out Drax and Rocket and Mantis as well, the five of them mumbling their concern as they disappeared.

“Why didn’t you tell me about Ego?” he asked, his voice small.

“Sit down,” Kraglin said. “You’re gonna make yourself sick.”

He obeyed, too drunk and sad to remember he was technically in charge.

Kraglin sat next to him, closer than either of them were honestly comfortable with on a normal day. “Yondu made that call. Wasn’t my place to defy him on that.”

Peter pulled his knees into his chest and rested his chin against them, closing his eyes and fighting off the spins. “But _why_?”

“Thought it’d hurt, I suppose. Better to think you didn’t have a daddy than let you know he was some murderin’ sunovabitch.”

He didn’t do anything about the tears that started stinging his eyes. “At least if I’d known I wouldn’t have… _he_ wouldn’t have…” He faltered. “If Ego hadn’t tricked me…if I hadn’t let him…”  He was grasping for excuses, but they all felt false. He wanted to blame someone; himself, Kraglin, Rocket, Nebula, just… _anyone_. He wanted a focal point. He just wanted to be _mad_. But he wasn’t anymore. Just coldly miserable. “You never liked me.” He wiped his eyes on the black of his sleeve.

“Hell, Pete. I was barely grown when we met.” A pause. “I wasn’t _that_ bad, was I?”

He thought about it for a long second; he remembered practice flights and being allowed to cut in line for food. Card games. Being a scared eight-year-old hiding between Kraglin and Yondu at night, after Taserface had threatened to kill him in his sleep. Retch showing up to breakfast with two black eyes the morning after he had maliciously tripped Peter in front of the crew just for a laugh. Kraglin showing up a few minutes later, his own knuckles bloodied.

“No, not that bad.” He let his head fall into Kraglin’s shoulder and sighed. “I just miss Yondu.”

He awkwardly patted Peter on the head. “Me too, kid.”

Silence.

“You’re gonna have an awful fuckin’ hangover tomorrow, Pete.”

Peter had already passed out.


End file.
